A blurry 1954 photograph just revealed a woman who ruled Egypt as king

A team led by Egyptologist Susan Kelly at Macquarie University says a black-and-white photograph taken in 1954 supplies evidence that Meretneith, a royal woman from Egypt’s First Dynasty, held the throne independently rather than only as a queen consort or regent. The photograph, filed in the records of British archaeologist Walter B. Emery, shows an inscription on a mud jar stopper unearthed in the 1940s at Saqqara. The findings appeared September 16, 2026, in the journal Prague Egyptological Studies.

Meretneith lived more than 5,000 years ago and was possibly a daughter of Djer, the third king of the First Dynasty. Egyptologists have never disputed that she governed Egypt in some capacity, since her tomb complex was stocked with the riches of a male ruler, but whether she held the throne in her own right, rather than as an interim regent, has divided the field for seven decades.

Her funerary complex, built in the royal cemetery associated with Egypt’s earliest kings, was constructed and furnished on a scale usually reserved for men who held the throne outright, which is one reason Egyptologists have long treated Meretneith as more than a consort even without a definitive text confirming it.

Walter Emery’s 1954 photograph of a mud stopper

The disputed text was found on 13 mud stoppers excavated from an unidentified tomb at Saqqara in the 1940s. Only one photograph of the inscription survives, filed among the papers Emery left with the Egypt Exploration Society in London; the location of the original artifact, or even the glass photographic plate, is unknown today. The image shows a row of four serekhs, the hieroglyphic sign pairing a stylized royal building with a ruler’s name, and Emery argued in 1954 that the first and fourth belonged to King Djer.

Emery went further, claiming the second and third serekhs named Meretneith, which would place her alongside Djer using the same royal marker reserved for kings. Many of his contemporaries rejected that reading at the time, arguing that the published photograph was too poor in quality to confirm what the signs actually depicted.

Crystal Miller’s digital reconstruction of a decades-old scan

Kelly, an honorary postdoctoral associate in Egyptology at Macquarie University in Sydney, worked with digital technician Crystal Miller, also at Macquarie, to reprocess the 1954 scan using modern software. Their method isolated the hieroglyphs, inverted the colors, and converted the image into a scalable vector graphic, producing a version, first generated in 2023, markedly sharper than Emery’s original hand-drawn copy of the same signs.

According to the published findings, the enhanced version shows that the name signs in the second and third serekhs are consistent with the primary hieroglyph used to write Meretneith’s name, the same marker of authority used for male rulers of the period. If the reading holds, Meretneith becomes only the second female ruler of ancient Egypt whose name was recorded inside the royal serekh emblem.

Meretneith’s decades-long career, from co-regent to king’s mother

The serekh photograph is only one piece of a larger case. Separate studies estimate Meretneith ruled Egypt for at least 30 years in one capacity or another, based on her funerary complex, inscriptions listing her alongside administrative titles, and impressions on royal tomb seals. A later ruler, Semerkhet, named her on his own tomb seal, a mark of political status Kelly’s research treats as decisive.

Kelly’s paper proposes that Meretneith’s political career unfolded in distinct stages rather than under a single fixed title. The royal serekh beside Djer’s marks her as co-regent, the tomb seals point to a later role as regent and king’s mother, and other texts describe her holding authority over the treasury and officials without any formal title at all. Kelly attributes that flexibility to Meretneith’s gender and position within the ruling family, noting that the male successors who came after her typically reigned once, died, and were buried by whoever followed, with no room to move between roles.

The identification remains a reading of a single blurry photograph rather than a freshly unearthed artifact, and the original mud stopper has not resurfaced since the 1940s excavation. Combined with the tomb, the seals, and three decades of accumulated evidence, though, the serekh reading gives Egyptologists the strongest text-based case yet, laid out in full via The Conversation, that Meretneith held genuine royal authority rather than acting only in someone else’s name.

If the reading stands, Meretneith would predate Sobekneferu, the ruler Egyptologists already treat as an undisputed female king, by more than a thousand years, and would predate the far better known reign of Hatshepsut by even longer. That chronology is part of why the dispute over a single blurry photograph has run for seven decades: confirming Meretneith’s status pushes the history of female kingship in Egypt back to the very start of the pharaonic era rather than treating it as a later exception.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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